remember I told you about the six conglomerates that own all mainstream media on the planet and which one the MONSTER that just bought the “mom and pop” bookstores such as Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc., belongs to. This corporation that bought Barnes & Noble and subsidiaries has, as it’s board of directors, OTHER corporations, representing themselves as they are legally entitled to, as individual persons. Shit! I at least had the illusion that the CEO reports to a Board of Trustees comprised of other plutocrats; grotesques, but nevertheless “real” human beings.” The CEO, to the extent there even is only “one” reports to a board comprised of hundreds of “individuals” many of whom employ thousands, are in the Fortune Five Hundred Companies, have holding companies and a parent company, etc. And it’s not even a particularly big fish with a particularly exalted place in the hierarchy of one of the Conglomerates….
No wonder my “world view” tends toward Kafka, Borges, Pynchon, Gaddis, Salinger, Mina Loy, Burroughs, Acker etc….all creeped-out city-folk…
No matter how abstract and sinister you think “the world” is, it’s actually much more complicated and much more sinister…
Remember that day about a month ago when I went into a Barnes & Noble for the usual reason — I had to pee — and then just walked around the multi-chromatic phantasmagoria and how I once a million years ago thought that while I knew as early as age 20 my kinda work would never sell, I did actually believe it would be available to casual browsers in bookstores and libraries like the “real writers” I used to browse around for when I was young…like GARP, Irving’s hopelessly cornball yet sentimentally ingratiating gift to American Literature — such as it is…I just stood there thinking that I and all the people I know, including yourself, (beyond GCM, which, I never realized until now, was published in the year last year of Art and Literature before “mainstream-accessible” intellectual activity stopped: 1986; you just made it) on or off-line, will never end up on “regular down the street” bookstore shelves…cause there are no regular down-the-street bookstores. Only a few scattered Indys and a Barnes & Noble for every…reader in America…
Can’t help quoting — or at least paraphrasing — myself on this one:
“…nostagia fear the future. Look to the past, it’s safe, you know it’s safe, cause you survived…” (from somewhere in Cella Fantastik…)
